I never had a problem dual or even triple booting any of my Macs... that's why I first switched to Macs in the first place is because they are the only computers that can (legally?) run Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux....<div>

Honestly, I've tried it before and in the end, decided it wasn't worth it. You have all of the *nix tools with OS X anyway, and the ones not already there you can get with the homebrew package manager.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">

I started a new job this week. It marks a significant shift away from academic research, web mapping and geo work back to my roots (sort of). I now spend my days writing Python to automate testing of software in SSD-based SANs. In particular, the devices provide guaranteed IO QOS for virtual environments. The company is is a start up called SolidFire and they just hit their first general availability release.<div>

<br></div><div>One positive is that they are a Linux shop. Most of the older geeks are ex-Sun storage people so they've always done Unix in one flavor or another. The SAN boxen are OEMed Dells running Ubuntu. As a contractor, I'm allowed to run whatever I want as long as I get the work done they need. The consulting firm that placed me did give me a 17" MacBook Pro that now dual-boots OS-X and Ubuntu (off my spare SSD drive). The automation team pretty much all runs Ubuntu 12.04 so I thought I'd play along. </div>

<div><br></div><div>Thanks to Wil for getting me started on rEFIt. Getting the Mac to boot Ubuntu was surprisingly painful but I immediately earned geek cred because no one else managed/bothered to natively boot Ubuntu on an MBPro. Several of the old Sun geeks made comments about the Mac hot keys screwing something up, assuming I'm running Ubuntu in a VM. One was actually shocked that I wasn't just running OS X.</div>